Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition (32 page)

“I think we walked right into this one,” Nine observed. “Obviously, it expected us.”

Once their ship finished docking alongside the harbor structure, the drones lowered a ramp and secured the vessel. Largely ignoring the passengers, the drones boarded the yacht and began searching the ship once Nine and the others were safely on the pier. The bipedal MoNITORs, much taller than the survivors, were awkwardly proportioned in comparison to the doors they ducked underneath to pass through.

Null was right; they had walked into a trap. One of the MoNITOR drones disembarked their yacht and approached Nine. Its movements were slow and meditated, designed to put Nine and the others at ease. The machine did not want them to mistake its movements for aggression.

“Please,” it chirped. “
The Mortal Coil
is now available for boarding.” The AdvISOR had expected them, that was clear to Nine, but this was a peculiar move. They were being herded from one ship to another. The drone escorted them to an open hatch in the side of
The Mortal Coil
, bright light spilling from the vessel’s interior.

“Should we board it?” Nine asked his friends.

“Do we have a choice?” Null replied.

“No,” the MoNITOR drone replied, its synthetic voice possessing the slightest hint of a threat.

Ignoring the remark, Ninety-Nine said, “The machines are already in our ship. Why not visit theirs?”

With Nine in the lead they crossed the platform that led into
The Mortal Coil
, whose interior was strikingly similar to that of Rose Garden. Nine ran his hands along the smooth walls that were effused with a white aura. The material’s texture felt like plastic but glistened like metal and a blue bead of light strobed under his hand and further down the hall before racing past once more.

For a while they walked down the blindingly bright and strikingly odorless hallway. Each time the bead shot by him, Nine imagined that
The Mortal Coil
’s mechanical heart beat in tandem with his.

“There’s another door…” Ninety-Nine broke the monotony of venturing down a featureless hallway, provoking the group into rushing to meet the newly-formed portal.

What Ninety-Nine had called a door was merely an opaque section in the side of the hallway wall to Nine. Were they trapped? Was this part of the AdvISOR’s plan to drag them away from their yacht and isolate them from the others? Null fearlessly placed her hand against the opaque section of the wall.

The barrier vanished, the portal opened, and Nine stepped through the lonesome break in the side of the hallway first. He couldn’t fathom what to expect but braced himself for the worst. At the fringes of the world’s end, the last vestiges of logic were being stripped away from him. He had not expected a ship whose size defied logic and convention; he had not anticipated urban deforestation that must have supplied its construction.

Nine found himself standing on a gangway suspended above the impressively wide cargo hold deep inside
The Mortal Coil
. Approaching the railing, he leaned over to study whatever it was that stretched out across the hollow innards of the great ship. Rows of machines lined the floor of the cargo hold. A dizzying number of them, each one featuring a tube of murky green liquid that was tall and wide enough to hold a body…

Nine recognized the machines instantly. They were almost identical to the ones that the rest of the Rose Twelve, in their slumber aboard the yacht, were encased within. Null and Ninety-Nine joined him, leaning against the railing, their silence confirming their curiosity. Despite himself, Nine reached for and took Null’s hand in his.

“What are those?” Null asked, seeing the rows of machines.

“I don’t know but there are thousands of them,” Ninety-Nine answered after a quick estimation.

“They’re stasis tubes where dormant clones are kept,” replied Nine, aware that something had built
The Mortal Coil
and put thousands of stasis machines inside the prodigious cargo hold. In one beat of
The Mortal Coil
’s heart, Nine solved the mystery of the ship.

“We aren’t here as this ship’s prisoners. We’re here to be its crew.”

Chapter Thirteen:

Grand Cross

To see the monster sweep through the streets of Haven, even five centuries after the population’s demise, was like witnessing the jubilant advance of death itself. While Seven and Eight were safely buckled into their seats aboard the helicopter, the monster rabidly pursued them on their journey towards Grand Cross. Bounding into the air, ripping through buildings of glass and steel, the allergen cloud giddily matched their pace. It roared as it spun, the mass of dust rotating and coalescing, smooth as water but as powerful as a flood. Seven believed, without a doubt, that this was the day the allergen cloud had waited for. This was the day that it would add at least two of the Rose Twelve to its list of victims.

Seven turned to Eight for strength because he couldn’t suffer through monster’s relentless pursuit, as it flowed across the empty streets and through the vacant cityscape. Was there any escape from the allergen cloud? From a weapon that could not be fought, only breathed and inhaled? Seven reconsidered his encounter with the monster at Pala Park where, in his most desperate moment, he had
willed
the monster to be gone.

Horrifyingly enough, it had obeyed.

“We’re very popular these days,” Seven declared, wrenching himself into the present.

“We? You were the one who beat it away singlehandedly.” Eight laughed nervously and the monster roared its disapproval from far underneath them. Could it hear their conversation from the city’s surface? Had it been engineered that way?

“It heard you,” Seven accused her.

Changing the subject Eight asked, “If I had told you three days ago what we’d be doing right this instant—going to Grand Cross to rescue Twenty—what would you have said?”

Seven’s speech failed him as he searched for an adequate answer. Gratitude. That was what he felt; that was the sensation that gathered around his heart as he hurtled towards Grand Cross with Eight at his side. He was grateful to be alive, grateful to be with Eight, and grateful for the risk that Twenty took to make it possible. Seven’s journey with his friends might have awoken old memories and old wounds but pain and fear were reassurances that he could still feel; that his emotions were still working.

But his gratitude outweighed the fear or the pain. To know, as Seven did, that his friends would do anything to bring him back, even if that meant surrendering a quick and easy escape for the chance to revive him, was precious knowledge.

“I would’ve said that it would take something heroic to get me to do this,” he finally answered, giving a partial voice to his thoughts. “Which isn’t that far from the truth when you think about it.”

“Agreed,” a pensive Eight replied.

As the minutes passed and the distance between the travelers and Grand Cross disappeared, anxiety silenced Seven. Contemplating what waited for him at the nightmare’s origin almost convinced him to quietly bid farewell to his hopes of escaping Haven with his friends.

The AdvISOR, the perpetrator of the purge, resided within Grand Cross. Woken from its slumber, the AdvISOR had ensnared Seven by using Twenty as bait and now, he realized unhappily, it would also capture Eight. The people he was closest to, in this life and the last, would be at the mercy of Haven’s artificial overlord. Seven clenched his fists, his jaw set tight, and vowed that this plan would succeed.

He refused to regret sending the others away; he would not allow himself to think that they should have run. Not that such thoughts mattered; Null and Ninety-Nine would never have abandoned them, he was certain of it. Even if they were barely friends, even if they hardly knew each other, they were each too precious to one another to leave behind.

“What is that?” Eight asked, her voice shaking him back into himself. Haven’s skyline vanished and their helicopter flew through empty skies. Seven leaned out ever the edge of the open door, staring down, and saw empty foundations burrowed deep into the ground. “Where are the buildings? Where are the towers?”

Seven didn’t know how to answer her. In the central and northern sectors of Haven, the majority of the buildings were decayed but standing. In the southern reaches of the island, the only remnants of the city were darkened streets. Seven could see the ocean, immobile and blackened, in the east and west.

“Is it supposed to look like that?” Seven gestured at the vacant swaths of land.

“Look!”

Grand Cross, its lustrous coal-colored spires blending into the night sky, came into view. The dominance of Grand Cross went uncontested by the empty foundations and flattened lands that surrounded it. Floodlights shone a harsh, bitter illumination upon the cathedral’s blackened walls, reminding the approaching visitors that Haven was nothing without the supremacy of Grand Cross.

As they drew nearer, Seven’s eyes identified a massive object in the harbor behind Grand Cross. He and Eight leaned out of the helicopter, almost too far, straining their eyes in a vain effort to identify the object. As if in response, a thousand lights blinked on in unison along the vessel’s hull and allowed Seven to see its unrivaled glory.

“A ship,” Eight whispered. “
The Mortal Coil
.”

The helicopter swung wide in its descent towards Grand Cross, giving Seven an uninterrupted view of
The Mortal Coil
. Hundreds of golden machines, crafted in the likeness of slim humanoids, busied themselves with work on the ship. Whereas Haven’s buildings might have been constructed to house giants, the ship at port could have been their vessel. Seven and Eight studied it in awed silence. Whoever was piloting the aircraft wanted the occupants to see the ship, to marvel at its grandeur, before reminding them that their main objective was Grand Cross.

Seven returned his attention to Grand Cross, whose original outline he could identify, even if the cross layout had long since been expanded upon. He guessed that the scientific center, eventually boxed in on every side, was forced to build upwards like the rest of Haven.

A frightening energy animated Grand Cross, whose dark stillness rose to embrace an even darker night sky. Attracted to the place’s festering anger, the helicopter angled itself for landing upon an elevated platform. Red lights strobed at each corner of the landing pad, a steady but silent warning to Seven and Eight of the impending danger.

Lining the walkway from the helipad to the doors of Grand Cross were more of the tall, humanoid machines that kept a patient vigil. Seven guessed that the golden drones, which were about twice his size, must be the MoNITOR machines that the AdvISOR created to meet its own purposes.

Seven made a point of stepping out of the helicopter first so that he could help Eight down. Above them, the blades circled in their slowing march towards paralysis. Eight offered him a brief, anxious smile as she regained her balance. She detected, just as he did, that something was amiss. If the AdvISOR wanted them dead then it could have shot the helicopter out of the sky. Their continued survival meant that the AdvISOR’s purpose was not as simple as murder.

Seven was knocked onto his back when the monster burst skywards, tearing the helipad apart. It grabbed ahold of the helicopter, wrapped its girth around the aircraft, and smashed it into the platform like a bladed hammer. Seven stumbled, rolled into Eight, and together they fell off the crippled platform. With another shriek, the monster threw the helicopter into the distance where the wreckage blossomed into flames.

Left to the monster’s whim, Seven dared to stand. Eight rose, their hands joined, as the monster swirled around them. It would have been beautiful, Seven thought to himself, if the monster wasn’t so perverse. Within the depths of the allergen cloud’s gleaming dust flashed the beast’s memories: the many murders it had committed, the terror of its victims, but the images were nothing compared to the sounds.

They were the screams of ten million dead, as recorded by the beast during its methodical execution and purge of a civilization.

Seven could hear them. Seven could hear every single person calling out to him, screaming through the centuries, begging for a swift end. Anger came first, instinctively and without hesitation. For a third time, Seven realized, the monster was trying and failing to kill him. To kill Eight. It had become a nuisance and Seven objected to dying outside Grand Cross when he had a right to know the secrets within.

“It’s over! The Descendants of the Founders are dead and their civilization has died with them!” he shouted at the monster. The beast resisted, it bellowed another outraged scream at him, until Seven called out in reply, “I command you to shutdown!”

The monster rippled and waved in unison with the rise and fall of Seven’s voice, as if it was listening to Seven. As if it was scanning his voice. The allergen cloud’s determination wavered, its conviction was shaken and Seven decided, almost inaudibly, “…you can go now.”

Wailing in misery, the monster convulsed and spasmed. The ancient screams, the old memories, they vanished from the allergen cloud’s depths. Bells rang in Seven’s ears but he could see the grains of sand angrily shuddering as they slowed to an unwilling but absolute halt. The monster exploded and spewed a torrent of brown, gold, and gray dust upon him and Eight.